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Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide · 5 of 11
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
ARG Design CRITICAL

Fan Creativity and the Prohibitionist-Collaborationist Spectrum

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide Henry Jenkins
fan-creativity participatory-culture folk-culture intellectual-property modding convergence

Problem This Solves

Media companies face a fundamental strategic dilemma when confronted with grassroots fan creativity: should they shut it down or embrace it? Getting this wrong carries enormous consequences. Prohibitionist approaches alienate the most passionate consumers, drive fan activity underground rather than eliminating it, and contradict the affective relationships that advertisers and entertainment companies depend on. Collaborationist approaches risk losing control of intellectual property but generate loyalty, innovation, and commercial value.

This reference maps the spectrum of corporate responses to fan production -- from cease-and-desist campaigns to open co-creation models -- and provides a historical framework showing that participatory culture is not an aberration but a return to folk culture norms after a twentieth-century anomaly of passive consumption.

Key Principle

Jenkins traces a three-era model of American cultural production: nineteenth-century folk culture (grassroots, shared traditions, no clear individual authorship), twentieth-century mass culture (industrial-scale production displacing folk traditions), and twenty-first-century convergence culture (a digital revival of folk practices). "The older American folk culture was built on borrowings from various mother countries; the modern mass media builds upon borrowings from folk culture; the new convergence culture will be built on borrowings from various media conglomerates."

Fan creativity exists on a prohibitionist-collaborationist spectrum. Media companies that treat active consumers as threats (prohibitionists) gain short-term IP protection but incur long-term costs; those that treat them as collaborators unlock innovation, loyalty, and commercial value. The twentieth-century model of passive consumption was the historical anomaly -- convergence culture restores the folk culture norm where everyone participates, "although participants may have different degrees of status and influence."

Good Examples

  • Will Wright and The Sims: Wright engaged fan communities early, gave key webmasters access to design discussions and mod tools before launch, never policed fan-created content, and rewrote terms of agreement to let fan distribution sites charge modest fees to cover bandwidth. Result: more than 60 percent of The Sims content was fan-created, over 50 fan sites at launch, and the franchise became one of the most successful in gaming history. Wright's insight: "What you can do to make the game more successful is not to make the game better but to make the community better."

  • Japanese anime fan distribution: Japanese companies tolerated grassroots fansubbing, campus screenings, and fan-made manga markets (some attracting 150,000 visitors per day). Rather than suing, they sponsored these events. The result was that global anime and character goods sales reached 9 trillion yen (US $80 billion), with much of that growth in North America built on infrastructure fans created.

  • Raph Koster and Star Wars Galaxies: Koster posted regular design reports online, created forums for feedback, and treated the fan community as a client team. He designed a player-driven economy and player-designed cities, recognizing that "the fans know Star Wars better than the developers do."

Bad Examples

  • Lucasfilm's Homestead program (2000): Offered fans free web space at starwars.com but under conditions that transferred ownership of all fan-created content to the studio. Fan advocate Elizabeth Durack exposed the strategy: "it lets them both look amazingly generous and be even more controlling than before."

  • Lucasfilm's Atomfilms contest rules: Permitted parody and documentaries but banned "fan fiction" that expands the Star Wars universe. Jenkins shows these ostensibly neutral rules created a gendered two-tier system: "the overwhelming majority of fan parody is produced by men, while 'fan fiction' is almost entirely produced by women." Female creative traditions like song vids were pushed underground.

  • Viacom's Australian fan crackdown (late 1990s): Called fan club leaders together to impose restrictive guidelines, prohibited episode screenings at club meetings, cracked down on fanzines, and banned use of Star Trek trademarked names. Their goal was to funnel fans into a corporately controlled fan club -- the purest prohibitionist model.

Key Quotes

"Allowing consumers to interact with media under controlled circumstances is one thing; allowing them to participate in the production and distribution of cultural goods -- on their own terms -- is something else altogether." -- Jenkins, Chapter 4

"Corporations have a right to keep copyright but they have an interest in releasing it. The economics of scarcity may dictate the first. The economics of plentitude dictate the second." -- Grant McCracken, Chapter 4

"Popular culture is what happens as mass culture gets pulled back into folk culture." -- Jenkins, Chapter 4

"In the end, the media producers need fans just as much as fans need them." -- Jenkins, Chapter 4

"Fan digital film is to cinema what the punk DYI culture was to music." -- Jenkins, Chapter 4

Rules of Thumb

  • Categorize any media company's fan policies along the prohibitionist-collaborationist spectrum; recognize that a single franchise may occupy different positions across different media platforms.
  • The "zone of tolerance" -- the implicit boundary within which fan activity is permitted -- is never fixed; it shifts based on corporate strategy, technology, and fan pushback.
  • Fan creativity suppressed will go underground, not disappear. Studios must accept distinctions between commercial competition and amateur appropriation, between for-profit use and the barter economy of the Web, between creative repurposing and piracy.
  • Release creative tools to users: even if only 1 percent of a million-user base creates content, that is enough to make a product self-sustaining.
  • Audit content policies for hidden demographic biases -- rules that seem category-based (parody vs. fiction) may map onto gender or other identity lines.
  • A thriving culture requires spaces where amateurs "can do bad art, get feedback, and get better." Do not impose professional polish standards on emerging creators.

Related References